Engineering Commons^™

Developing A Small-Footprint Bioengineering Program, Alisha Sarang-Sieminski, Debbie Chachra

Alisha L. Sarang-Sieminski

The field of bioengineering is rapidly changing and expanding to include not only more traditional bioengineering applications (e.g. device-focused areas such as prosthetics, imaging) but also more recent sub-fields and technologies(e.g. more biologically-focused areas such as those enabled by tissue engineering and microfluidics). This rapid change, coupled with the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of bioengineering, presents a unique challenge to the developers of academic programs, as they need to both select relevant content and strike a balance between depth and breadth. We, the architects of the bioengineering program at the undergraduate-only Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, which enrolled its first …